2007 Alumni Weekend Sermon
by Abbot Matthew Stark
As Jesus continued his journey to Jerusalem, he traveled through Samaria and Galilee. As he was entering a village, ten lepers met him. They stood at a distance from him and raised their voices, saying, "Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!" And when he saw them, he said," Go show yourselves to the priests." As they were going they were cleansed. And one of them, realizing he had been healed, returned, glorifying God in a loud voice; and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. He was a Samaritan. Jesus said in reply, "Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?" Then he said to him, "Stand up and go; your faith has saved you." - Luke 17: 11-19
In the Gospel account given above, 10 lepers are cured by Jesus. The cure takes place as they are on their way to the priest to show themselves to him and be certified by him as healed. The leprosy spoken of in the Bible is not what we call leprosy. That disease, Hansen's disease, is extremely serious and until recently was not considered curable. The biblical disease was characterized by change of color such as white spots on dark skin and when hair in such spots was white. Swelling, scales, and infections were also reckoned as leprosy. While suffering from this disease, the Law of Moses required that the person live away from non-leprous people. In that sense, they were outcasts. When healed and certified as such by a priest, the person offered sacrifices and thus made atonement for the former impurity.
The healing of these 10 lepers can be read in different ways. Christ is the Word by whom all things were made. He is the creator who recreates these men. He who made them remakes them. He is the one who has powers over even disease, which he can cure by a word or, as in this case, by no word at all. He simply tells them to go to the priest, and they are cleansed as they go. He does not pray over them or use any sort of incantation or words of healing. He does not touch them. His will alone is enough to bring about the healing.
Clearly, however, it is striking that the Samaritan man, having been healed, returns to thank Jesus. The Samaritans have been described as being a schismatic group from Judaism. They were regarded with contempt for being people who compromised the Law. The Jewish historian Josephus frequently speaks of them with hostility. It is clear, too, from other places in the Gospels that Jesus' disciples shared this general view of hostility and contempt for the Samaritans.
Jesus, however, treats such Samaritans as he meets in the Gospel accounts with courtesy and respect. Here he goes out of his way, so to say, to underline that it is the Samaritan who is the one who returns to offer thanks. It is this act of thanksgiving that is the center of the account. The simple lesson is that we owe thanks to Christ, the Word of God made flesh, for our creation and our recreation brought about by his suffering, death and Resurrection.
The holy Sacrifice of the Mass is also called the Eucharist. Eucharist is from the Greek word that means "thanksgiving." The Mass enshrines Jesus' own act of thanksgiving at the Last Supper: "Before he was given up to death, a death he freely accepted, he took bread and gave you thanks..." The thanksgiving of Christ becomes our thanksgiving in the Holy Sacrifice. Our thanksgiving derives its great value from being part of Christ's sacrifice.
The Mass specifically thanks God the Father, through Christ, for our creation and our recreation by Christ's redemptive work. The Church knows that these are the truly thankworthy events of human history. All our other reasons for thanksgiving are subsumed under these.
In the Eucharistic sacrifice is the actual sacrifice of Christ: his passion, death, Resurrection and Ascension are made present to us today. In the Mass, we are as essentially present to those events as if we had been there at their occurrence. This is because Christ Jesus himself is present in his glorified body when the priest consecrates the bread and wine by saying, "This is my body" and "This is the cup of my blood." The Church knows that these words are not idle, they are not empty. What they say is true. The bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. He is the new bread from heaven, the new Manna, by which the Church is fed on its pilgrim journey and by which it is able to offer an unending sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to the Father.
One of the earliest witnesses to this faith outside the New Testament is St. Ignatius of Antioch, who died a martyr's death in Rome around the year 107. Sources make him a disciple of St. Peter and St. Paul. He said, "The Eucharist is the flesh that has suffered for us and that the Father has raised by his will." In a sense, that is a clear and full statement of the essence of the Mass. The great martyr, Bishop of North Africa, Saint Cyprian, died in 258. He says, "The passion of the Lord is the sacrifice we offer." Again, we have in a few words the essential teaching of the Church on the central act of her worship.
This clear teaching of the Church went more or less unquestioned until the Reformation period of the 16th Century, when both the sacrificial nature of the Mass and also the transformation or transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ were denied. The reformation churches abandoned this view of the Eucharist, in effect, and adopted, on the whole, a symbolic understanding of their rite of Holy Communion. That rite did not convey the reality of Christ's redemptive work, but was a symbol of it. It is an interesting fact that in the past century, not an insignificant number of Protestant scholars have moved closer to the Catholic doctrine, which is also the teaching of the Orthodox Church of the East.
To conclude, we can turn for a summary of the Church's teaching to Blessed Pope John XXIII who said:
"The Mass is the adorable sacrifice in which God himself is at the same time Victim, Priest and the Divine Majesty to whom the sacrifice is offered; not merely the symbol of the sacrifice of the Cross but the sacrifice itself, mysteriously renewed and re-enacted forever, without the shedding of blood.
"It is an infinite sacrifice, the efficacy of which is restricted only by our own lack of fervor and devotion.
"All light in this world streams from the sacrifice of the Mass. There is no alleviation of the pains of Purgatory that is not distilled like balm from the overflowing chalice of the Eucharist. There is no increase of heavenly glory but through this sacrifice. Moreover, and this is a much greater thing: no newcomer can enter heaven except through the sacrifice ever-present in the Mass.
"It is impossible to find or imagine a closer bond between Man and God."
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